How to Get Found in Web Searches

How and why does Google pick these Star Wars sites out of the millions of others?

First, you need to understand how popular search sites like Google and Yahoo work. Let’s discuss Google, since they handle the vast majority of the world’s website searches. First, on Google’s Technology Overview page, they have a brief explanation of their ‘PageRank’ technology:

Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

Years ago, ‘traditional’ search engines only looked at the words on the page, and in meta tags. Of course, that made it very easy to ‘cheat’ the system by repeating words, putting incorrect info into meta tags, adding hidden words to pages, and so forth.

But notice that Google bases their search results on the entire link structure of the web. Modern search sites determine a site’s importance by looking at, among other things, who links to that site. Normally a better site has many other sites linking to it, whereas a fake or inferior site doesn’t.

So the point is that it is very important to convince other sites to link to you; otherwise your shiny new site with all those fancy keywords will be mostly ignored. But how do you get other sites to link to yours? Stay tuned for more info, or contact us now to have your questions answered!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 12:14 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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